


The Cost of a Good Man

by arcapelago (arcanewinter)



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Childhood Friends, Holocaust, M/M, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-01-25 20:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1661915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanewinter/pseuds/arcapelago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik and his mother flee Europe before the advent of the war to live on the Xavier estate.  Charles never questions their good fortune, or his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Parts I and II

I.

Charles knocked on the door to the small cottage at the edge of the Westchester property, nestled in a copse of trees with the waters of Breakstone Lake just nearby. It was beautiful weather, warm with few clouds, the smell of grass thick and full of happy memories playing on the lawn somewhere between the cottage and the mansion--usually closer to the cottage. He'd mostly outgrown that, now, but at 16 he was here knocking at this very door like he had since he was 6.

Before long a woman drew open the door, her brown hair neatly curled and pinned up off her neck as it had been every day he'd ever seen her. She smiled to see him, always generous in her affection despite their lack of relation. Likewise, his fondness for her was outshone only, perhaps, by his fondness for her son.

"Good morning, Mrs. Lehnsherr," he said, making his tone overly formal and bowing stiffly because it made her laugh. "Is the Young Master Erik in?"

"Of course he is," she said, letting the door slip open wider and calling her son downstairs. Naturally, Charles could have beckoned Erik himself, but then he would miss these exchanges at the door.

Erik appeared at the bottom of the stairs, his hair freshly slicked back in a style Charles could never pull off. He joined his mother at the door and slipped his arm around her for a hurried half-embrace.

"Not so fast," said Mrs. Lehnsherr, hooking Erik back to her as he moved to leave. "Let me wish you a Happy Birthday, Charles, before you two rush off." She leaned into the kitchen and straightened again with a foil-wrapped parcel in her hand, which she gave to him.

"Thank you, Mrs. Lehnsherr," he said, flushing with a smile and another little bow as he took it from her. "You know it's my favorite."

She winked at him. "You're not supposed to know what it is, yet."

Charles blushed further, but before he could apologize Erik had ducked from her side and was tugging Charles away. "I'll be back later!"

Erik smelled terribly good, and his arm felt warm linked in his, lean and strong and insistent. It was almost enough to make Charles forget his delivery.

"Wait!" he said, turning them around before they got far. He reached into the breast pocket of his blazer for the letter there and extended it to Erik's mother. "Ainsley asked me to deliver this." Actually, Charles had insisted--Ainsley was too old-fashioned even to think of making such a request.

She seemed to recognize the handwriting on the envelope as she took it with a Thank you. Charles began to turn away as she opened it, but Erik stubbornly (or obliviously) ignored the attempt at privacy and stood firmly waiting. "Is it from him?" he asked.

Mrs. Lehnsherr nodded slowly, a frown weighing on her mouth as she read.

"Your uncle is moving address," she said. Charles did his best not to listen, staring at the grass, but it was impossible. "He won't be writing again."

When Charles glanced to Erik, he saw some of the same frown his mother wore. Resolutely, he avoided peering into his thoughts to satisfy his curiosity.

Mrs. Lehnsherr read a few more lines silently before she finally straightened up and shooed them off with a kind smile that said children needn't be burdened with adulthood. "Go now. But back before dinner, both of you."

Charles would have preferred a more formal departure, but Erik's arm tightened around him to drag him away without room for ceremony.

* * * * *

The water was still quite cold at the end of the dock where Charles shared his layer cake. He sat with his legs under him, but a braver Erik let his feet dangle in the water--he said the chill gave him focus. There was a rowboat at the bottom of the lake, he said, and one day he was going to raise it by its rowlocks.

"I thought you didn't have any family left," said Charles, crumbling up the empty foil. His voice was gentle, but Erik had never made a secret of his circumstances. His mother was all he had of home.

Erik looked up at him, then bent to fix the cuff in one of his pant legs. "He's not really my uncle. But he's the reason we got out of Europe before the war. He told us what he thought was coming and he gave us the money to come to New York."

Erik said it so casually that Charles, at first, failed to grasp the full impact of it. But it came to him slowly, like the little waves in the deep lake beneath the dock.

"He saved your lives?"

Erik shrugged, sloshing quietly at the water. "I suppose."

Charles rolled his shoulders and sat forward, elbows on his knees. He had never really considered how lucky it was that they'd left when they had--that it could have turned out horribly, unthinkably different. "I never knew that."

"He's written to my mother a few times over the years. But we've never really known him."

"You never met him?"

"Once." Erik smiled faintly, but it was quickly gone. "I was probably two or three. All I remember is his chair, because it was metal."

Charles smiled, too, lying down with his back to the sun-baked boards, his heels on the edge of the dock. The sun felt good on his face, a breeze sifting through his floppy hair. It wasn't the fashion, but Erik liked it better that way.

Thank God the man did what he did. Thank God. "What's his name?"

"I'm not sure. He doesn't sign the letters." Erik lay down on his back at Charles' side, and Charles felt his fingers brush along his hand and settle there. "Francis, I think."

* * * * *

Charles stood on the terrace, carefully pruning the rose bushes his mother--the sad, cold woman in the mansion--loved so much. He supposed it meant something that he was the only one allowed to care for them, the only one permitted to cut the blooms and bring them inside for her.

Of course, it had been years since she'd actually asked him to do it. And his stepbrother and stepfather would never think to try. But she never stopped him from doing it. It meant something.

Mrs. Lehnsherr approached him along the wide stone balustrade that held the bushes from the terrace. "Careful of the thorns," he said, and she nodded, taking him very seriously for his benefit.

At his side she admired the unfurling buds he had collected a moment before she spoke. "Do you think I could be driven into town tomorrow afternoon?"

"Of course," said Charles, eager to be helpful. Too eager, perhaps, as he glanced toward the house and added with a shy smile: "She won't mind."

Mrs. Lehnsherr saw right through him, and she patted his hand where it rested beside the rose stems. "You're a good boy, Charles. Goodness is hard to come by."

Charles noticed the tremble in her fingertips before he saw her eyes suddenly well up with tears that stopped short of spilling over.

"What's the matter, Mrs. Lehnsherr?" he asked, focusing with all his might not to learn the reason himself. Concern and anxiety made it much harder to accomplish.

She smiled, waving away Charles' sympathy and laughing gently to leaven the subject. "Erik's uncle, he is leaving his house in town to us. I'm to sign the deed tomorrow, after he has left."

The thought of she and Erik moving to town filled him with a sharp panic, but he knew, at the same time, that university was not far off for them, and without Charles' influence the Xavier estate could become less than welcoming to her. So he held his tongue until he'd come to terms with it, and nodded gently. "That's very kind of him."

"Kindness is all I have known of him," she said, softly, studying the roses again. She looked up. "And that he is like you," she said, tapping her head, then extending her hand to Charles, her fingers cool on his temple. "Up here."

Charles lifted his brows in surprise. "Like me? Then he's--"

Inside the house a chilled void grew restless, colder, like a blizzard gathering strength. It was better to meet it before it began looking for him. "I have to go," he said, gathering up the roses carefully and kissing her cheek. He gave her one of the long stems with a bud beginning to unfurl upon it. "I'll have the car brought around for you at 2 o'clock tomorrow."

She took it from him with a nod of thanks and a warm smile, which Charles could only glimpse as he hurried inside to the unpleasant howl of his name.

* * * * *

In the evening Charles was back at the cottage. He'd taken a late supper there, as usual, and shared with the Lehnsherrs some contraband from the Xavier pantry, where it might otherwise have spoiled, forgotten and uncelebrated.

Afterward, he and Erik lay together, clothed, on Erik's tiny bed that nevertheless felt more comfortable than the lonely behemoth in Charles' room at the house. They often spent the evenings reading, as though ready to sleep, but just when sleep would be most welcome Charles would have to climb out and make the cold journey through wood and lawn to his own bed. But he chose this every time, the one shared book that they read together: Charles' voice in Erik's head, Erik's imagination illustrating each page.

When Charles felt Erik begin to doze, he set the heavy book aside and watched the even, unburdened breath in Erik's chest. His eyes drifted to the line of his jaw and lingered there.

"You may be moving away from here," said Charles, softly.

Erik opened his eyes.

"Maybe." He lifted his hand like it weighed a stone and set it on the side of Charles' neck. "You should come."

"Maybe." 

He watched as Erik's eyes closed again, and for a while he allowed himself the luxury of the same.

"Your uncle is like me, she said." Behind closed lids Charles recalled the way she'd told him, touching him so close to the seat of his power. It never failed to move him: her warm acceptance--even pride--at the things Charles and her son could do. "A telepath."

Erik rolled closer to him, his hand slipping to rest between them. Charles opened his eyes.

"Really?"

"Yeah."

Downstairs a clock was chiming, telling him to go home, to his own bed.

He was going. He was going. Soon. For now, Erik was warm, the bed was warm. Erik's breath was warm and his hands were warm resting between their chests in the small space.

He was going. Soon.

He forced his eyes open a final time.

"You know my middle name is Francis?"

Erik, half-asleep, only sighed.

* * * * *

Charles wasn't one for fantasies.

Suspecting no higher intelligence acting on the world's fate, he had never questioned the arrival, one day, of a boy his own age to grow up with. He had not questioned the timing of that event. And he had not wondered, even, at the serendipity that this boy would be _different_ like Charles was different.

Tonight, that was changing. Tonight, somewhere between Erik's bed and his own--somewhere on his path through the wet lawn beneath an endless blue field of stars--Charles, this one time, ceased to believe in coincidence.

* * * * *

When the car stopped in town Charles stepped onto the pavement and looked up at the modest townhouse, so closely neighbored that the entire street was an unbroken wall of windows and doors and brick and shutters, lined by streetlights, where they were working. Above him the roof line was closer, plainer than the mansion's, cutting a neat angle across the sky still deep blue and silent.

He hadn't made it to bed that night. On the contrary he couldn't get here fast enough. He'd been informed of a cosmic deadline and he had heeded it.

Charles wasn't proud that he'd taken the man's address from Mrs. Lehnsherr's mind. Nor was he proud to have woken their driver hours before dawn. Mr. Bramley he had compensated with the generous bill he tucked into his hand; apologizing--and explaining himself--to Mrs. Lehnsherr would be much harder.

Especially when he could hardly explain it to himself.

As soon as they'd entered town he'd closed his mind up tight, in as far as he could test such a thing. So he couldn't be sure who, if anyone, was inside the townhouse with its single lamp shining in the front window. From where Charles stood its light cast a sense of familiarity like a spell. A dream-like pall was settling over him heavy and fast. And he became afraid, though curiosity remained stronger.

He stirred as the car left him as he'd requested. When he was fully alone, he took the steps quietly to the door. He turned the knob without knocking, and it gave, unlocked and unresisting as he stepped inside. Diffused light revealed rugs rolled and stowed; furniture was covered. Compared to the clutter of the mansion the space felt empty despite these things: they were already memories, already gone.

His shoes tapped lightly on the battered flooring as he moved hesitantly through the hall. A creak of metal drew him to the only room that was lit, and he felt the pressure under his skull as the man tried to be hidden from him.

"That won't work easily on me," said Charles, his voice rough and shaking faintly. He came to rest almost reverently at the threshold of the room, hazarding a glance inside. "But I think you know that."

The man lowered his fingers from his temple. Half-turned toward the door, his hands slowly folded in his lap, on top of the blanket that covered his legs.

"I wondered," he said simply, after a silence, "what might happen should this occur." His eyes wandered over Charles slowly, thoughtfully. Wearily. "I suppose nothing. You know who I am?"

The man, with his graying hair and tired face, did not immediately resemble Charles. But with the sad, patient tip of his head the mirror fell into place so sharply that Charles had to look away, stare at the wall, where a painting he would have liked already hung in the space where he would have placed it. He looked away, again, to bare space on the open floor. He nodded, words momentarily stuck dry in his throat. Possible or not, he knew.

"You helped them escape," he began, his voice sounding muffled in his ringing ears. He forced the words out to anchor his presence here, to shatter the dream, if it was one. But the room remained as it was. He shook off his repulsion enough to look up again. "Why them? Because Erik is like me?"

The man tapped his gathered fingers on the arm of his chair before he answered, familiar blue eyes catching the lamplight. "I knew Erik, too. Given the chance to spare him, I took it."

"But now, you're leaving." Charles consciously strengthened his voice. "You told Mrs. Lehnsherr you're leaving. You've never even spoken to him."

The man's brows lifted gently. "On the contrary. I grew up with him. I may make a life with him."

For a moment, Charles' face bore the same expression. He was still poised in the doorway, his heart pounding like he shared the room with a ghost. Certainly this man was the ghost of something. Certainly something had died--had been put down, kindly, with tears and compassion.

"It's too difficult," guessed Charles, humbly. Drawing up his courage, he stepped into the room, the floorboards creaking to thin the silence. "To be near him. Is that why you have to go?"

Tentatively, he reached out with his mind. He hadn't mastered his control of it yet, not when he sent it out like this, but to the best of his ability he brushed gently at the consciousness of the other, despite his fear of its existence.

He'd wanted it to be kind, an invitation to share the burden with him, let him see and perhaps relieve some of the pain. But the man's mind turned from him, not harshly, but absolutely.

Instead, the man reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew something. He paused as though weighing it, then held it out to Charles.

Charles stirred, stepping closer to accept it. Though their hands didn't touch, Charles couldn't ignore that they were the same. Charles met the man's eyes, and was momentarily overwhelmed by their sorrow, though it was neither projected nor intentional.

"That is all you will carry of mine."

He looked down at the key he'd been given, then noticed the papers on the table next to the man's chair, ready for Mrs. Lehnsherr to sign. He straightened slowly.

What becomes of a world where a man slips out, he wondered, where a man leaves a void? Does it circle around the empty space, slowly at first, then spiraling in to fill the shape of him? Or does it note the absence with the same indifference it reserves for death? Did the other Erik miss this man? Did he remember this man at all?

"Do you regret it?" he asked, quietly now. The room and the street had gone so hushed that the world seemed to have stopped existing outside the lamp beside the man's chair.

"Leaving my own time?"

The man smiled lightly, his gaze dropping as he shook his head. It was not an answer, but a disinclination to give one. "There was nothing left that could be changed. Not there."

"But here--" suggested Charles, dully, and the man nodded.

In the quiet Charles looked down at the key again, running his thumb over it, wishing he could draw something from it the way he'd read some people could. But the man surprised him by speaking again.

"There is one thing I do regret," he said, quickly, as though to outrun his better judgment.

Before Charles could do more than look up, the man had folded his hands tightly on the blanket and gone on. His voice was more measured now, slow with feeling. "Do you remember a girl who came to your home, with skin she could change at will?"

Charles nodded carefully. He'd never forgotten her fascinating ability. "She was hungry. I invited her to stay. But a few days later she had gone." He frowned, grasping at other details he couldn't recall. "Did she visit you, too?"

The man smiled, but the expression immediately crumpled, and he looked away. "And she stayed. She--Raven--was supposed to stay with you. She became a sister to me."

Charles kept silent, solemn in the wake of the man's emotion, which he was already gathering back into its box with a slow breath.

"But you were not lonely as she was," the man added. "You didn't need anyone like she did."

Charles clenched his jaw in a tight frown. So he'd failed her? She had needed him? "If I'd known--"

The man shook his head. "The hand was dealt, and I dealt it." He pressed his lips together so that they lost their color. It returned as he caught Charles' gaze. "But if you should see her again--if I should find her again and send her to you--"

"We'll welcome her," said Charles, sincerely, breathlessly. "Of course we will."

The man nodded and closed his eyes. One thought to comfort him, Charles guessed.

Charles dropped his gaze to the key again. Mrs. Lehnsherr would have a home of her own. Charles would have Erik. Perhaps one day they'd have Raven, too.

"If you find her," said Charles, "why not keep her with you? So you will not be alone."

The man unfolded his hands and lowered them to the wheels of his chair. Charles watched them tighten there and goaded himself to step back, realizing he'd perhaps been standing too closely.

"She's supposed to be with you," said the man. He hadn't moved, but his hands remained on the wheels. "There are consequences--everything I change--"

"But it's for the better! Look what you did for Erik and Mrs. Lehnsherr. You don't know--"

Erik and Mrs. Lehnsherr--but surely Erik had once had other family. What happened to them?

Charles felt the weight of his hands as they hung at his sides. His grip slowly tightened around the key. The man was watching him, and something had changed in his expression. Something had changed in Charles, too.

What about everyone else? All those other people?

"Why didn't you stop the war?"

The man said nothing, but his gaze flickered.

Charles felt his stomach dropping, tightening like his fist.

"You could have done it." His voice was heavy with the enormity of his realization, growing with every rapid-fire recollection, everything he knew about the brutalities of the world. "I know because I see what I'm capable of already, and it frightens me, but if I knew something like that was coming, I'd--"

"It's not that simple," pressed the man. "The power of hatred in the world--"

"Don't," said Charles. As much as he could see the shame and self-loathing in the man's face, he could not now lessen his own, could not stop the escalation of horror that this man--that _he_ \--could have allowed what was avoidable. "Don't say anything."

Charles was backing away when he heard the car outside. He hoped it would pass, that the driver and Erik would miss the address, but Charles didn't cast a distraction quickly enough. Neither of them did.

Instead he turned and ran to the door, pulling it open just as Erik reached the stairs outside. Erik noticed the chair lift beside them, but it didn't stall him from meeting Charles at the door.

"He's already gone," said Charles. He didn't want Erik to see him--didn't want to admit what he'd have to admit. He tried to take Erik's elbow. His driver hadn't left yet.

"Why did you come without me?" asked Erik. He'd stopped the door from closing and was stepping around Charles, curiosity driving him. He stepped smoothly out of Charles' grip and was inside the hall, out of Charles' reach in an instant.

"Erik, there's nothing--" Charles called, not knowing what excuse he would give for his behavior. He tried to draw him back with his mind but only won Erik's distracted glance behind him. "We shouldn't be here--"

But the door to the parlor wasn't very far. Erik had already reached it, his hand on the wooden frame, pausing as he cast a tall shadow behind him.

 _Don't recognize him,_ Charles pled. _My God, I can't tell him._

Erik slowly slipped from the doorway and disappeared. Charles heard the creaking of his measured footsteps fading deeper inside.

When Charles crept with dread to the threshold, Erik was already at the table by the window. The deed to the house was in his hands as he examined it by the light of the lamp.

Beside him, the man sat quiet as the grave, his eyes on Erik's face. As Charles watched, his gaze, at first awed and open, weakened and grew bright with the lamp's light. The man brought his hand slowly to cover his mouth while the other gripped the arm of his chair, but his eyes never left Erik's face. Surely he knew Charles was there, but he wasted no glance in his direction.

Slowly, Charles stepped into the room. Hearing him, Erik turned and tilted the papers to show him. "The deed is here. But it looks like we've missed him."

Charles smiled as well as he could, showing him the key in return.

"I suppose it's what he wanted," he said. As Erik approached to take the key from him, Charles stole one last lingering glance at the man in the chair.

Their eyes met for a moment, and Charles couldn't help but think the man deserved all the heartbreak he saw there.

 

II.

The day their letters arrived at the mansion, they clamored down to the end of the dock at Breakstone Lake as a matter of ceremony. They exchanged letters, and Charles tore Erik's open nervously to read it.

Erik's whoop of celebration took the words out of Charles' mouth; the hearty clap he gave him on the shoulder knocked the breath out, too. "You're in!" Erik shouted, though he was hardly a foot away.

Charles laughed with him, letting Erik's arm draw him in tightly and breathing in his joy. "So are you. A proud new scholar of chemistry at Pembroke College, Oxford. Full scholarship."

Erik whooped again, all too close to Charles' ear, but Charles didn't mind. "You got one too," he said, adding with a pulled face, "Not that you need it."

Charles endured it easily, returning the face. "You hardly need it yourself, these days." Quickly scanning the area, he tugged Erik down to kiss him. They were breathless, and careless, but it made the moment more real to Charles for all its clumsy honesty.

When Charles stepped away, he was already thinking of packing. He'd moved into the vacated cottage months ago, so at least he'd already begun the process of rounding up the things that mattered to him. And perhaps he would never be back. The thought filled him with hope.

"Come on," he said, turning and tugging Erik along behind him, "we can call your mother from the house."

But Erik was slow to move. "Politics?"

Charles turned back. Erik looked up from Charles' letter with a quizzical expression. "I thought you wanted biology."

Charles smiled thinly, tightening his grip of Erik's hand.

"I changed my mind."

* * * * *

As far as Charles could tell, the man kept his word to Mrs. Lehnsherr. There were no further letters to her. The legal matters concerning the house had all been thoroughly settled in advance. So two years into university, when a fat envelope arrived for Charles addressed in his own handwriting, he tossed it into the bottom of the trunk in his dormitory and left it.

Erik, though, hadn't forgotten the man. From time to time he wondered aloud about the uncle who had intervened so miraculously in his young life. "Sometimes I think I remember him," he would say. "His eyes."

Erik never remarked on the resemblance, if he noticed it. Charles tried not to give him the chance.

* * * * *

The door to the dormitory slammed as Erik returned. Charles heard him flop with exhaustion onto his bed, but was too busy taking notes from his textbook to look up. "Have fun?" he asked.

"Of course not," said Erik. The bed creaked as he shifted. He sounded as though he'd sat up. "I thought you'd be there."

"I don't feel it's the best way to spend my time," murmured Charles. He crossed out the last few words he'd written and corrected them.

"You're studying politics," huffed Erik. "I would think rallies would rank pretty highly on your list of worthwhile ventures. Especially this one, Charles, we--"

Charles sat back with a sigh as he rubbed his aching eyes shut. "Did you change anything?"

There was a silence in which Charles turned in his chair to find Erik's somewhat cowed expression. "Maybe, maybe not. But that's what we're trying to do."

"Trying." Charles sighed again, taking the afternoon paper from his desk and tossing it into Erik's lap. "In the meantime, this."

Erik frowned at it, clearly upset by the headline and the brutal details of the attack. Angrily, he tossed it back. "And what are you doing instead?"

Charles pursed his lips to silence himself, turning away. Picking up his pen again, he murmured, "We don't need to beg them, Erik. When it's time to act, I will act."

Erik said nothing for a long moment. Finally, Charles heard him stand from the bed.

"What do you mean by that?"

"I think you know." Charles let his pen rest on the page, bleeding ink. "'Talking' that first-year down from the roof is the least of what I'm capable of."

"Don't even joke about that," said Erik. "It's wrong. Your ability--"

"Yes," said Charles, closing an argument he didn't wish to have. "Of course, you're right." He turned in his chair to smile. "I'll come with you to the next rally, all right? When is it?"

Erik met his gaze with doubt he didn't bother to try concealing, but he finally straightened his mouth and sat down at his own desk.

"Next Friday."

"Splendid."

* * * * *

They were already thinking about graduation when a blond-haired, grey-eyed young woman appeared at their door.

"We met once," she said to them. "Years ago."

Erik beckoned her inside. Charles made her tea, and vowed to give up his bed for her until they moved out in a few months' time. Hiding, in the meantime, would not be an issue. Her smile when she said it was automated, a fabrication in itself. Much of what she said was spoken behind a veil of learned distrust, but she was here, now, and her presence spoke openly where she yet couldn't.

Though Charles was genuinely glad to have another chance with her, her arrival brought his worst fear back into the realm of possibility. He already knew what Erik wanted to say when he followed Charles out into the hall. He knew, but he couldn't bear to stop him. He'd already promised himself that no matter what he would never compromise Erik's thoughts.

So Charles could only let it happen.

"She said he was in a wheelchair," Erik said. His voice was hushed, but bright with hope. "The man who told her where to find us."

Charles played ignorant until it was no longer reasonable to do so. "You think it was your uncle."

"We could find out. She has an address."

"It's a year old, Erik." Charles smiled gently. "She said it took her a year to decide to come here."

"It's worth a shot," Erik countered. "Will you come with me?"

Charles pursed his lips. The crestfallen expression on Erik's face made it clear what a surprise his hesitance was. Charles half-turned to the wall outside their door to escape Erik's expectations, kicking at the baseboard. "How many families did he save, Erik?"

Erik frowned, puzzled. "Mine. A handful of others."

Charles faced him again, shrugging. "No more?"

Erik scoffed. "What do you expect from him? You know he was at risk, himself. They took the handicapped, too. What more should he have done?"

 _Infinitely more,_ Charles thought, but he kept it in the pit of his stomach where he crushed such shame before it crushed him. _He was capable._

Shaking his head, Charles turned, stepped away, then stopped. "I just wonder that he may not be the man you think he is. That's all."

When Erik didn't answer him, Charles looked back over his shoulder.

Erik met his eyes, his jaw strong with disappointment.

"I used to think you thought the worst of everyone because you'd seen it inside them," he said, and the coldness that darkened his eyes then was perhaps the same that Charles was afraid of all along. "I'm beginning to think it's just you."

Erik left him in the hall without sparing him another glance.

* * * * *

In the end, Erik took the train alone. As a gesture toward their dwindling friendship, he called Charles from the station in Italy to say the flat had been empty. From what Erik could understand of the landlord, it had been vacant for the past ten or eleven months. It was rundown, shabby--Erik's description, not the landlord's--and nobody wanted it.

Charles wondered if the man had pulled another trick, but unless he'd involved the landlord, it didn't seem likely.

He cleared his throat lightly, turning to lean his back into the wall by the phone in the dormitory hallway. "Did he--did the landlord say if he'd lived there with anyone?"

The other end of the line was silent. Charles worried he'd lost the connection, but Erik's voice came through.

"He'd been alone."

Charles let the words sink into him. Did they sadden him? Was he sorry?

"I'll see you back soon, then?" he said.

"At graduation," Erik answered, after another pause.

"That's weeks away," said Charles, frowning. "Where--"

"My time is up," said Erik. "I'm sorry, Charles."

The line went silent again. This time Charles knew it was permanent.

* * * * *

They saw each other sometimes once a month after they left school. It was a wonder they did it at all, Charles smoking with a whiskey at one side of the café table, Erik reading the paper with a coffee at the other, closely watching the time for when he'd have to return to the lab. Erik would offer news of Mrs. Lehnsherr, which Charles was always sincerely glad to hear; Charles would reciprocate with word of Raven, if not Raven herself, who sometimes accompanied him. After years of Erik's relentless optimism, Charles took a strange comfort in her cynicism, though he wished she hadn't suffered so to acquire it.

"Hm," said Erik. He lowered his paper enough for Charles to see his lightly furrowed brow.

"What's that?" Charles asked. He snuffed out the butt of his cigarette and took up his glass instead.

Erik looked up as though surprised Charles had taken an interest. He took a sip of his coffee, visibly gathering his answer. "It says in the spring of '32 a handful of politicians and law men in Europe separately all committed suicide. Nobody thought their deaths might be related until now." He folded the paper with the article on top and pushed it toward Charles. "I think with the scale of horrors they were apparently planning, their consciences got to them."

Charles turned the paper to find the article and scanned its contents. He'd heard only a few of the names before. Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler, Klaus Schmidt, some others.

Frowning, Charles started reading again from the top. "Things could have been much worse than they were," he said at last, reverence softening his voice.

Suddenly his eyes froze, mid-paragraph, mid-sentence. He leapt up from his seat, knocking his whiskey onto the newspaper. His hands shook as he righted the tumbler and fumbled with his wallet, laying out enough money for both their bills. Erik's look of unabashed confusion did nothing to slow him. "I have to go, I'll explain--I think I'll explain later."

He gave Erik no time for a response. He couldn't wait for a taxi, and ran through what felt like half of London to his lungs but was in reality just short of a mile. In his building he took the steps two at a time to his flat and nearly tripped into the door before he could get the key into it and stumble inside.

Raven wasn't there to see his frantic search through the trunks he'd brought from university. He kept telling himself he'd unpack them one day, but it was the first he'd opened their lids since he'd tossed the ephemera of Oxford inside.

He found the envelope. It was battered from its treatment at the bottom of the trunk and nearly fell open in his hands when he lifted it. He tore it open the rest of the way and pulled out the folded papers inside, neatly stapled at the corner.

War. A war report, released the year that Charles had received the envelope. Final counts--the final, published tally of the lives lost in the camps during the last years of the war. Twelve and a half thousand. Charles knew the number already. It was a number he hated, a number he carried inside him always. But next to it in the margin was another number, penciled in the same handwriting as the faded envelope.

Eleven million.

Charles was already sitting on the floor, his back against the bed. If he hadn't been, he would have found himself there.

 _It went around you,_ he thought. He thought of the man's stricken face, lit by a single lamp in an empty townhouse. _You tried and it went around you._

But it was gutted, weakened, and he hadn't done _simply nothing_ like Charles had condemned him so absolutely for.

_My God, I've been wrong all this time--_

He rolled to reach the stand by his bed, pulling down the telephone and gripping the receiver tightly. He dialed for Erik, frantically, and waited with the thudding of his own heart while it rang and rang. Was Erik still sitting with his coffee and a soiled paper? _Go home, Erik, I need you--_

When there was no answer, he dialed again. "Come on!" he muttered. His chest was aching with everything he'd ever held and hidden there. "Erik, please!"

"Please, what?" said Erik. He'd finally come to the line.

Charles sat up. "Erik, listen, I'm sorry about earlier, but I'll explain. You told me once you thought there might be a way to amplify my mind. Something electric--something magnetic."

Erik took his time on the other end of the line. For Charles, it was agony.

"Charles," he began, and Charles hated the sound of that doubt. He knew it well. "If this is about your political intentions, I told you I will never--"

"It isn't." Charles sighed, at himself, at his oversight. "Erik, I'm done with that. We need to find your uncle. We have to find him."

"Why?" asked Erik, and he had every right to be suspicious. "Why now?"

"Because I was wrong." Charles leaned, suddenly so weary, against the bed and pressed his palm over his eyes, thinking of the loneliness, thinking of the years, thinking of the way the man had looked at Erik with the deed to the house in his hands. "Because you should know him."


	2. Part III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Having forgiven himself, Charles attempts to set things right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think parts I and II stand, appropriately, on their own. But I'm weak, so here's how I envision the implied conclusion to it.

Charles straightened in his chair, his hands gripping the crude circlet at his temples as though after months of searching he could hold onto the signal with his bare hands. In the old broadcasting studio they'd bought and converted according to Erik's theory, Charles had come close to success so often that Erik, despite the intensity of his hopes, often spent his time buried in the notes of his own work on the other side of the room. But as the moment lengthened, even Erik roused himself to attention at the creak in Charles' uncomfortable chair, at the crackle of renewed energy over the wires. As Charles held his breath, and his knuckles ached around the circlet, the connection persisted long enough for Charles to note the man's surroundings, his elusive context in the world in which he'd been hiding.

For months Charles had caught only glimpses before losing them, or being shut out. This time it was different, and it soon became apparent why. His heart sank.

Charles lifted the circlet from his head, ignoring the final twinge of pain between his temples.

"He's in Edinburgh. But we'll need to hurry."

*****

Seven hours later they arrived at the hospital. Three hours after that, the man in the bed opened his eyes.

He focused first on Charles, who sat in a chair past the foot of the bed. Immediately after, his gaze found Erik, asleep in a chair to his side.

"He's not seen you," said Charles, quietly, though between the two of them there was no real danger of waking him. Guilt--Charles' closest companion for a long time now--brushed its hand over him. "I gave him the impression you were more bandaged than you are."

Charles had gestured loosely around his own head, and he watched the man lift his hand to find the bandage wrapped around his forehead.

With apparent effort, the man dragged his gaze from Erik and worked his dry mouth. He looked to the table on the other side of his bed, and Charles rose to approach it, concentrating on pouring water from the carafe into the cup instead of staring at the man's face. But as he helped the man to sit up against the pillows and handed him the water it was impossible not to view him, not to acknowledge the way his own face would appear in forty-odd years, the way his hair would grey and thin.

When the man sat back again, holding the cup in his lap, he looked at Charles wearily.

"It's past visiting hours," he said. Perhaps he'd already learned from the medical staff outside that he'd passed out from a simple thing like dehydration and struck his head. Perhaps it had happened before.

"I know," said Charles. A nurse walked past the open door of the room and did not even look in.

"Be careful with that."

Charles' eyes dropped from the door of the room to the man in the bed and he fought the wave of defense that rose hotly through him. "I'm trying," he said, quietly, because he was. But it was a difficult thing to have a power and not want to use it, use it against people, to make life easier, better. And for what he was, wanting was nearly the same as doing. Could he ever separate the two? It was crucial that he did.

Charles drew the chair behind him close to sit in it, slowly, as though unsure of placing himself with any permanence in the man's sphere. But the man did not object, even if Charles knew he'd prevented this for as long as he could.

"I'm sorry I didn't open your letter," said Charles. "I'm sorry I didn't let you explain, before that."

To Charles' surprise, the man smiled, but though kind it was devoid of any real happiness. "It kept us apart. It kept you from telling him. I regret only that it changed you."

Charles lowered his gaze to the floor between his knees. He knew it was true. But how is a man to know that the path he's followed wasn't the path meant for him--how, except for the disappointment he felt from the boy he'd grown up with, who had believed in him with everything he had, and now no longer? Charles looked up again, across the hospital bed to where Erik slept in his chair.

"He wants to know you. I can't keep you from him." _He already suspects the worst of me._

The man's grip tensed around the flimsy plastic cup so that a few drops of water escaped it. He relaxed. "I had promised myself I wouldn't so much as write to him. Perhaps I could start."

"No," said Charles. "The truth. He should be given the truth."

The man shook his head with a protest on his lips but Charles sat forward. "You're the man he thought I'd be. The person he thought I was. He deserves _you._ "

The man's brow furrowed deeply, but despite the intensity of his eyes his voice was calm. "Look at you. Can you not see your own blinding youth? Do you think I was the man I am now at your age? My faults are still plenty, but I assure you the cup overflowed."

"Maybe I'll get better." Charles thought of Erik's mother, of the goodness she had seen in him. He thought of Erik, in Westchester, as they planned their lives out. "I _will_ get better. But by then, he may be out of reach. When he's a family of his own and hasn't thought of me in years, do you think he will have any room for me then?"

The man let Charles' words waver heavily in the sterile air of the hospital room, studying his face though Charles wished to hide it, though Charles wiped his eyes with embarrassment and eventually sat back, away from the scrutiny. With an ill-fitting impatience he nearly ordered the man to speak, to say something, but mercifully he did not get the chance.

"What cruel irony if this be true," the man mused, softly. He turned his head against the pillows to view their sleeping friend, but his thoughts were unspoken. Yet Charles felt their wistfulness, the churn of their tired regret, so worn and familiar to this man that it seemed fitted into a hollow made to house it.

If the man did not agree to this, Charles knew he would prevent it. He could sense that his own considerable power paled in comparison to what years and experience had won his superior. He couldn't force it. It was distasteful even to imagine it, for once.

But he knew, too, that if he made still more excuses to keep Erik from his beloved uncle, he would lose him. There would be no more question.

Perhaps the man in the bed knew this, too.

"Not here," he finally said. "I will contact you when I am ready." He finally turned his head to look toward Charles again. Though the light was dim, Charles could see the redness in his eyes, the flush in his face against the white bandage. "Until then, let me rest."

Charles swallowed the tight mix of nerves and anticipation and relief that rose in his throat. He nodded, and stood just as a nurse entered the room to tell them they should have left long ago.

*****

Erik was silent as they left the hospital. His long strides left Charles to catch up behind him.

"He's going to be fine," Charles called to him. The night was dark and damp and swallowed his voice. "We'll be able to see him at home."

"Unless you lose him again," said Erik. He did not slow or even turn the words over his shoulder.

"Not this time," answered Charles, but it was weak, and he let it be weak. Erik had been so angry when Charles explained where they'd find his uncle that they'd driven in silence almost the entire way from London, and Charles knew that whatever good faith he'd earned during the grueling search was forfeit. Erik blamed him for the lost time, for not helping him earlier. He wasn't alone in that.

The distance between them grew as Erik continued to outpace him. Charles no longer fought it.

*****

It was nearly morning when Charles stepped into the old hotel near the hospital. He secured a room with the disinterested receptionist and ascended the creaking stairs, neglecting to bring a newspaper from the front desk.

He wondered if Erik noticed these things in him, how he'd changed since that afternoon he'd so frantically telephoned to say he'd been wrong. Yet all he had to offer were the little things. He could not boast how far he'd withdrawn his influence in the world without admitting how deep it had gone. Even without his mind he had the money. And until that afternoon months ago, he'd had the reason.

The excuse.

But he thought he'd been right. He'd been trying to balance against a heavy weight indeed, revealed to be made of straw. The fall had knocked the wind out of him, and he was still trying to breathe again.

On the third floor of the narrow building Charles stopped outside Erik's room. Instinctively he always knew where he was, no matter how much he gathered himself in. He could no more obscure that knowledge than he could ignore which way was up.

He didn't linger. He continued on to his own room just down the hall--a coincidence, surely. Unless.

Charles sighed.

*****

Over the next two days Charles worried increasingly that Erik had been right. Perhaps the man had gone again, while Charles was hundreds of miles from Erik's machine. Perhaps once he'd reached it, he'd never find the man again. He'd only been lucky. He might not be lucky again. Erik worried these things too, and Charles was careful to note the pinched look in his eyes that said so, even if Erik himself did not.

But late in the morning on the third day Charles heard him. He turned and raced back through the plaza and to the hotel, where Erik was sitting at the side of the old worn steps, watching the passers by. He noticed Charles as he approached, hardly clandestine for his huffing, and had stood up. The look on his face was anxious, but closed. Charles was used to that look. But it hardly mattered now, did it?

"He's called for us," he said, panting with his hands on his knees, craning his neck to keep eye contact. "Are you ready?"

"Where? Will we need the car?"

"For my sake, please," Charles coughed. "I'll tell you where."

*****

Erik seemed calm and collected until they'd exited the car and Charles pointed to the door of the little narrow house with stone walls wedged snugly between two larger buildings. The door was almost a cheerful blue, though it was peeling for want of repair. Erik's eyes were settled on it while the long fingers of his nervous hands fidgeted and smoothed the front of his jacket.

"You're sure this is it?"

"I'm sure," said Charles. This was exactly the place they'd been called to. He drew his eyes from the window and tried to appreciate Erik's moment. Charles had denied him this for so long. "Are you ready?"

Erik's hands had stilled. He looked like a boy again, vulnerable, accessible.

"He risked his life for me," he said, quietly. "I don't want him to regret it. I want him to like me."

Charles watched him carefully. Erik hadn't confided in him since before they'd left Westchester. Nostalgia and gratitude unfurled from their dormancy and grew up into his throat to choke him.

"I'm sure that he will," Charles answered. "I know he will. Come on."

But as Charles grew bold enough to curl his fingers around Erik's arm, Erik's expression had changed. His eyes had acquired the unfocused hallmark of someone listening to an indistinct but mesmeric call. Before Charles could speak, Erik turned his face to look at him, as out of a dream, in two worlds at once.

"That's not you, is it?" he said, slowly. "In my mind just now."

Charles kept his grip of Erik's arm, though it was gentle, gentle so Erik might not notice.

"What's he saying?" he asked. He did not listen for himself. He would not.

Erik's brows descended slowly. "He's trying to prepare me." His murmur sounded unfinal, leaving its soft edges unbound as he turned away again. He lifted his hand to the door. The latch dropped. "He sounds exactly like you."

*****

Daylight hardly reached the inside of the house through its few, thick windows. Instead, a handful of lamps illuminated the sparse sitting room they'd entered.

Further inside, the old carpet gave way to faded linoleum. An overhead light hung over a kitchen table, its glare lengthening the face of the man seated there. He looked tired and pale in its yellow hue, but the resemblance was clear. The resemblance was blinding, and Charles hung back as he pushed the door quietly shut behind him.

Erik was several paces further in. His posture was tense, alert, uncertain.

"I came to meet my uncle," said Erik, his voice too low to betray itself. "Does he not exist?"

The man slowly straightened in his chair. He unfolded his hands from the table and wheeled himself out from behind it so that he did not hide. "He does, and he doesn't. I am the man you met when you were very small, though I know you remember the metal in this chair most of all. I am the man who saw you out of your family home and into the home of my younger self. I am the man who wrote now and then to your mother. Therefore yes, in the generous capacity in which she bestowed the title upon me, I am that uncle, and thus far I do exist."

Erik stood silently a moment before he turned back to look at Charles--a Charles whose lack of surprise was sorely telling.

"How long did you know about this?"

Charles held his gaze as evenly as he could. "We met the day I went into town and gave you the key to your mother's flat."

For a moment Erik didn't seem to remember it. His frown deepened the further back he seemed to search until finally the line of his mouth flattened.

"Why didn't you tell me? Why would you keep something like this from me?"

Charles looked at him helplessly. It was such a stupid, conceited reason now that he knew the truth. And he wouldn't have had to keep the secret at all if he'd only waited to listen at the time. "I was--"

"I told him to say nothing," said the other. Charles' eyes darted to him with his lips still parted. Erik slowly turned his head. "This is not my time, you understand. I wanted to minimize my influence on your lives."

"You came here from the future?"

"Of sorts."

"Was it an accident?"

The man paused. "No."

Erik stood straight and unmoving between them, gaze drifting to center. He seemed like the axis whose world churned around him, a stable core despite the tidal forces that threatened him.

He finally turned. "I'll see you at the hotel," he said to Charles, flatly. "I can't handle two of you right now."

That Erik did not move told Charles it was his invitation to kindly leave them.

Charles frowned. Past Erik, the other had tipped his head sharply, his eyes alertly curious, but he did not object. Following his lead, neither did Charles. He played down his disappointment the way his mother had taught him--not that she had ever meant to.

"Of course," he said.

*****

Charles was drunk by the time he went to bed, but not so drunk that he didn't wake up when Erik's mind, rattled and more egregious than usual, moved into his periphery two hours past midnight. He stumbled out of bed and managed to pull open his door just as Erik had reached his own, down the hall.

Erik met his eyes. He made a brief sweep of Charles' person--his rumpled pajamas, his bare feet, his bleary and stinging eyes wincing in the hallway light--and stepped into his room.

The door didn't close behind him--an invitation, perhaps.

Cautiously heartened, Charles stepped out into the hall and approached. He leaned around the door frame and watched Erik at the small sink in the wall, splashing water over his face. He closed the taps and took the nearby towel to dry himself, then rounded the bed with a tired, heavy step and sat down on it, facing the door. He lifted his eyes.

"How did it go?" asked Charles, lifting his shoulders and his tone for an approximation of cheer. He stepped more fully into the doorway.

Erik's gaze dropped thoughtfully. His mouth hardened, then relaxed. "There's a lot he won't tell me. About where--when--he came from. About me. The other me."

Erik looked up at him again. Taking the chance, Charles stepped over the threshold into the room and registered no change in Erik's mood. He closed the door behind him, hardly daring to look away.

"Did he tell you anything at all?"

"How much do you know?"

Charles frowned lightly. "Very little, actually. We've hardly had two conversations."

Erik watched him for a moment, perhaps not doubting him, but exhausted. Slowly he leaned forward as though to stand, but to Charles' surprise he sat down again a little further up the bed.

Charles stepped further inside and carefully lowered himself to sit beside him.

"He told me," said Erik, the rhythm of his words slowing as though he were trying to paraphrase as closely as possible, "that the world had showed him, the other Erik, the worst of itself. And that he had never expected anything better from it. And never hoped for it, either."

Charles studied Erik's face in the lamplight. "He didn't say why?"

"No." Erik pursed his lips again, lifting his gaze from the worn carpet to the wall across the small room. "But I can guess. He brought my mother and me to safety. If no one had done that for us--"

Erik fell quiet, the words closing wetly. Charles bowed his head. It was easy for him to imagine what Erik didn't say. For years it was his fixation, because what hadn't happened to Erik happened to so many.

But he kept silent. His words were not important.

Erik suddenly brightened, as though he'd found a foothold out of deeper, darker thoughts. "He did say we might call him 'Professor,'" he said, glancing to Charles beside him. "It felt strange for me to call him by your name."

Charles smiled to think of it. Professor. "Really?"

Erik nodded with his own easy expression of mirth. "I always thought you'd make a good teacher. Growing up, I mean."

Charles' smile faltered before he forced it back. "What else did you talk about?"

Rising, Erik began to pace in the small space before him, suddenly animated. "Me, actually. Though I hardly realized at the time just how much. I wanted to know about _him_ , but he kept bringing it around again. He gave me advice, about my ability, where it comes from, how I can refine it. I told him about my studies, about my work. He was very interested in my plans to start my own research firm, what I hope to do with it."

Plans Charles had heard nothing of. Still he watched Erik with his best show of support, even if Erik hardly saw it.

"By the way, he also told me the trust he set up for my mother and me--at first he needed to borrow his family money, your money, but in the end your own estate was unaffected."

Charles felt the corner of his mouth twitch. "I never worried about that."

Erik had finally stopped pacing to stand in front of him. "I just thought you should know."

He finally lifted his eyes from Erik's hands to his face.

"Anyway," said Erik, but Charles was already rising to his feet. "I should probably--"

"Get some sleep," said Charles, pleasantly. He clapped his old friend on the arm. "I'll see you tomorrow."

*****

As it happened, Charles didn't see Erik for the next two days. On the first morning there was a note. On the second there was nothing.

Charles stared at the empty space for a long, hard moment before he closed the door to his room again and washed up and dressed. He had a quiet breakfast by himself, then found a telephone box down the street.

He smiled to hear Raven's voice as she picked up. "How are things in Londontown?" he asked.

"Boring," she said. "Your personal library is the pits."

He laughed into the receiver and rested back against the inside of the box. "Agreed. No trouble?"

"Nothing. Oh, you got an invitation in the mail. Some big gala."

Charles frowned. There would have been a lot of powerful men in that room, to his great convenience. "Going to have to pass on it."

"Really?" She didn't sound so much surprised as intrigued. "Can I go?"

He laughed, absently watching the people who passed by on the street. "Certainly. The food will be excellent, though I'm not sure about the conversation. Though, Raven--"

She gave him a moment of expectant silence while he toyed with the telephone wire. Finally she prompted him. "Yeah?"

He pursed his lips. "How about a change of scenery instead?"

*****

Charles hadn't brought much with him to Edinburgh. It didn't take long to pack it up again, even through the surreal fatigue of the very early morning hour. He moved quietly, as though there were anyone to wake. He moved slowly, as though still asleep himself.

When he was finished he shut off the light to stand at the small window thrust oddly into the corner. There wasn't very much to see, just the crowded and complex angles of old rooftops under the dark sky. There was more to feel, for the handful of souls nearby who were not in their beds were preoccupied with the isolation of the hour, travelers in their own city, visitors in their own lives.

Somewhat closer to dawn he stirred. He left the lights off as he collected his bag and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him. Though he knew the hallway light to be quite dim, it seemed unnecessarily bright as he made his way to Erik's door and reluctantly knocked. He felt the initial rise in Erik's awareness, though it tapered off, and Charles knocked again. _Erik, it's me._

Erik's mind hadn't quite broken the surface of consciousness when Charles heard the turn of the lock. Gently he eased open the door and went in, setting his bag down by the door. Despite the interlude of the hallway, he could still see the room clearly by the light from Erik's larger window. Erik lay on his back with the bedclothes resting midway up his bare chest, and his eyes were closed though his sleep was light. Charles came closer to sit at the edge of his bed. Selfishly he had wanted more from this moment, but now, rightly, he didn't have the heart to wake him further.

"I'm going," he said. "I'll be on the train to London soon, then I've a plane to catch."

Erik sighed through his nose, but he didn't otherwise respond.

There really wasn't more to it than that, but Charles stayed where he was. It was peculiar to be in the same room as Erik and not feel the vague bristling just under the surface. Charles found himself transported back to Erik's room in Westchester, to the ease and the comfort of a closeness he'd so taken for granted. But he couldn't blame the boy he'd been for believing he and his Erik would be forever. Charles barely had any memories that didn't include Erik. 'Forever' had been a reasonable prediction based on accumulated experience.

Well, it had been a good guess.

Charles got up from the bed to depart, and Erik stirred. He mumbled, nearly indistinct, but clear enough for Charles.

"I'll see you this afternoon," he had said.

Charles' confusion lasted only an instant, coalescing abruptly into understanding. He smiled, so that he would sound happy.

"I look forward to it," he replied.

*****

Charles watched the lights of the British Isles slip out of view with a knot in his stomach that had nothing to do with flying. Outside his window the ocean was black and featureless between the clouds, a fitting backdrop for this stage in his life, that of a pioneer who is nevertheless bound for home.

But there were stars dotting that curtain, too. Raven was already asleep with her head on his shoulder, looking the actual starlet with a scarf over her hair and sunglasses covering half her face. Her façade was yet intact, but it wouldn't hold if she slept any more deeply. Charles had already struck a subtle precautionary tactic of preventing the few other passengers in first class and their attending stewardess from noticing them. He wondered if his senior self would approve of that. He wondered a lot of things the Professor wouldn't tell him.

But there were some things he did.

Charles had gone to see him that morning, before boarding his train. It seemed wrong not to, having all but dropped Erik at his doorstep and vacated, even at Erik's request. But to Charles' relief, even at that early hour, he had not seemed cross. In fact he'd seemed quite happy. A note of levity had crept into his face, his voice, to balance the darker weight of knowledge. Now he really did look the Professor.

At the Professor's invitation, Charles entered, and was immediately freed of the burden of his intentions.

"You're leaving," said the Professor. He studied Charles thoughtfully, but there was neither disappointment nor satisfaction in his manner.

Charles nodded, casting his gaze to the thin carpet and pressing his hands into his pockets. "Home. I'm going back to school."

He could feel the Professor's eyes on him, but still he did not feel judged, and inwardly he sighed with some unexpected comfort.

"Anthropology?"

"Er, biology," Charles confessed. He looked up and smiled with uncertainty. "I could do both."

The Professor laughed quietly. "No, do as you like. You'll absorb a little of it all whatever you do." Though the softness in his smile persisted, the mirth waned as he met Charles' eyes. "What of Erik, then?"

Charles pursed his lips, then slowly stepped further into the room and sat down on its only chair. Its cushions gave easily, a comfortably used piece of furniture that had certainly come with the rooms. "I'd actually like to ask you that," he said, and he lifted his eyes to catch the Professor's expression as he wheeled himself closer.

His brows weighed heavily over his eyes, and his mouth had thinned in a careful frown.

"What happened to your Erik?" Charles asked.

The Professor didn't immediately answer. His lips parted in thought as he looked away, his eyes seeming to scan the empty mantle over the fireplace. He brought his hand up to cover his chin, his fingers sliding over morning stubble almost audibly when he slowly drew his hand away again, lips now closed in a tight line.

At first it seemed he'd not open them again to answer, but gradually the corners of the Professor's mouth sagged and came open as he spoke.

"I loved Erik. I think he loved me. But we were longtime enemies. If I stood in his way, he'd go right through, warning me at every step, but never hesitating." The Professor sighed, toying with the edge of his arm rest, eyes lowered to it. "He almost killed me many times. Then, one day, he thought he had."

When the Professor didn't continue, Charles sat forward, frowning. Where the Professor was so gracious not to question him, Charles was not so refined.

"You left him like that? You let him believe it?"

The Professor sighed again, slowly, pushing himself back in his chair with one hand while the other wiped down his face and then rested. "As I lay there, I nearly was dead. And for such a brief instant, I felt what he was feeling--a privilege he seldom granted me." His eyes found Charles, and he smiled almost helplessly, shrugging in his chair. "I had thought he'd feel anger. Remorse. Upset. Dare I say, some form of grief." Wistfully, he looked away again with a shake of his head. "Relief. That's what I felt from him. He was relieved."

Charles remained at the edge of his seat, though he suddenly felt very weary, very heavy, and wanted simply to sink into the chair and out of the world.

"Yes," said the Professor, softly. "Exactly that. And so I did, because I had a good friend who could do it, and though she hated to, she did it for me."

"Do any of them even exist anymore, as you knew them?"

"They do, in another place. From what we could gather, time can be fragmented, not altered. You are not really me. Your Erik is not my Erik."

"Do you miss him?"

The Professor laughed quietly. "That's complicated, and you've a train to catch." But he gave it some thought, and said, "Perhaps it's accurate to say I mourn him."

Charles bowed his head with a nod, and rose to his feet. "And--" He knew well enough that he shouldn't ask, but it was already out of his mouth. "Did he do that?"

Explanation was superfluous, especially between the likes of them.

The Professor made a weak smile. "Accident."

"'It's accurate to say,'" echoed Charles, and the Professor acquiesced.

Reluctantly, Charles prepared to go, wondering if a Goodbye was appropriate.

"Oh," he said, "I nearly forgot."

Charles fished in his pocket, and like their meeting some eight years ago, brought out a key to give him.

"The key to my flat," he said. "Erik's work is in London. I expect he'll want to return there eventually."

The Professor's hand had closed around it and returned to his lap. He watched Charles without speaking, which made Charles feel somewhat foolish.

"It's not ground floor, but there's an elevator." Then remembering why he never used it, he added, "Do take Erik with you the first few times, it needs sorting." Then on second thought, "You'll probably find someplace more to your liking, but it's a start."

To his stammering, the Professor replied simply, "Thank you."

Charles nodded. "All right. I should be going."

The Professor followed him unhurriedly to the door. Charles opened it, but turned in the passageway.

"Don't judge me too harshly," he said. "When you get there."

The Professor smiled, kindly, but his voice was quiet. "Never."

Charles had nodded gratefully, and had pulled the the door shut behind him, thinking that last part was rather _un_ like their meeting eight years past.

Well, Charles thought as he pulled the little shutter down over his window, he couldn't change all that had happened. He could only change.

He looked up at the sound of dinner trays. He was tired, but hunger eclipsed it, and he sat up gently, nudging Raven as he did.

"Hungry, darling?" he asked her.

"Always," she answered.

*****

At first, Charles made his home in the cottage. The smallness of it was close and comforting, and its smell of wood and linen brought back to him his happiest memories there. Kosher meals at the table, record playing in the sitting room, stories in Erik's tiny bedroom. Mrs. Lehnsherr had taken with her most of what made the space uniquely theirs, but the furniture remained, and on every surface was the stamp of their occupancy, if only because Charles had been there, and Charles remembered. Charles was a ghost in those rooms, drifting through his own past.

But Raven wanted to live in the big house. She was fascinated by the large spaces, the countless unused rooms, the tall windows and their taller curtains. She said it was too lonely a place for one person and begged him to join her there. Eventually he was coaxed, and she celebrated the occasion with wine she'd found in the endless cellars. Charles slept there from then on.

Charles had expected to hate it, and at first, he did, though for her sake he kept it to himself. But as he explored the attics with her; as they rummaged through drawers that hadn't been opened in decades; as they raced through corridors and danced in the kitchen and picked their favorite bedrooms of the week, Charles came to appreciate his home in a way far removed from the fear and the apprehension and the displacement that used to greet him at the door like a snarling dog.

When Charles enrolled at Harvard, he still came home most weekends and even some weeknights when Raven became sullen, the house now boring her. To help the situation, Charles introduced her to Mrs. Lehnsherr, and to his relief the two got on from the start. They both longed for the company, and where Charles had suggested family, Mrs. Lehnsherr exuded it. When Charles visited he could see how much Raven flourished to feel a part of something.

Charles attempted to build on that. In between his studies, he replicated as best he could the design they'd made in the broadcasting station in London, and had some crucial parts brought over where his efforts weren't enough. He even managed to improve it somewhat so that his skull no longer hummed with tinny pain when it was switched on. With this crude instrumentation and his cruder skills, he succeeded in finding a handful of others who were different as they were different, and he encouraged Raven to cultivate these friendships, by letter, by wire, by meeting where possible.

It wasn't long until Charles was the one alone in the house.

He visited with Mrs. Lehnsherr when he could. More than once he was present when Erik made his weekly call to her, spending that small fortune without question, and when that happened he deftly excused himself with a kiss to her cheek rather than be so close to the voice. As far as Charles could tell, Erik had not discussed the situation with her, but with Charles across an ocean from him, the larger details were obvious, and unremarked upon.

In the beginning, they did speak. Charles was not interested in secrecy, and he was not all that interested in solitude. But he could hear in Erik's voice the barest undercurrent of impatience, of obligation, of duty fulfilled, and so he let their conversations grow shorter until they did not happen at all.

And so when Charles graduated with two new degrees, he came home to his empty estate, took a bottle of wine from the cellar, and walked the very peaceful grounds until the bottle, too, was empty. At Breakstone Lake he set it down on the wooden dock and sat down beside it. He squinted at the water, trying to remember where Erik had said the little rowboat lay on the lake bed. He had half a mind to dive in and find it, but that was the wine talking, and instead he rested back against the sun-warmed boards and fell asleep, which was the wine acting. He dreamt of the boat, and it was not pleasant. He was still alone when he woke up.

It went on like this for a time. There were variations: Charles did not always drink, he often slept in an actual bed, he usually did not dream of boats. But he always woke up alone, and it became part of him so that he did not mind it, or even notice it. Food continued to be delivered, and he made a fair job of making it edible. Mostly he concentrated on the device he'd reassembled in a finished section of the basement, where the only sounds seemed to come from the earth itself and all the people treading upon it, people he spent hours learning from and feeling for.

There were times he forgot he was Charles at all, and these repeated realizations settled around him like silk, easing the passage of the months into years.

Humming to himself one morning, preparing to descend the steps for some breakfast, Charles was surprised to hear a banging about somewhere above him. He turned on his heel and went to investigate.

It turned out to be a bird, unhurt but unable to find the tiny window of the servant's quarters it had managed to use as its entry. Charles was not much of a bird charmer, but he did manage to avoid injury to either of them as he gently corralled the creature back toward its freedom. He was just reaching up to draw the window further closed when he felt that he was not alone on the grounds. Another moment's consideration told him it was not a deliveryman, repairman, or determined solicitor. His eyes widened.

He nearly tripped over the wooden chair between himself and the door, then flew with improved dexterity down the narrow hall and its cramped staircase. He raced through the larger spaces and wider stairs of the lower floors and burst out of the heavy front doors with some bruising, then ran with a winded chest all the way to where the Professor and Erik had stopped some distance along the path to the house.

He all but fell over at their feet, bending to hold himself up at the knees, panting with laughter as much as asphyxiation.

"Are you going to need the chair?" asked the Professor, and Charles laughed more, almost giddy, almost crying from a joyous incredulity. He had thought he'd got on well in solitude, but he'd been wrong before.

"I'm so happy to see you," he managed, lifting his eyes in the morning sunlight to look at them, accepting that they did seem real. Time had indeed passed; Erik's hair was different, the Professor's chair seemed newer. "Can you stay long? I'll call in the staff."

It was then Charles noticed the suitcases set down on either side of Erik, who smiled at him.

"We were rather hoping to stay more permanently," he said. "If you'll have us."

*****

All the words Charles had been saving up wanted to rush out of him all at once as he walked with them to the house, carrying Erik's suitcase, but he forced himself to slow down, to be civilized, to mind his manners. But inside he felt like a child--not the withdrawn child he'd been, but a child of the world he'd come to know, with a focus so searingly narrow that he did not temper his happiness with heavier responsibilities. Not right now.

"I heard from Raven last week," he said, watching Erik help the Professor over the few stairs to the door before he could even begin to assist. He resolved to have a ramp put in by morning, and hurried to haul open the doors that had drifted shut. "She's having a lovely time darting around the globe with a polite reddish fellow she met a while back." He caught an odd glance from the Professor as he hurried back to take up Erik's suitcase. He followed them into the foyer.

"I thought she was here with you," said Erik. He set the Professor's suitcase against the wall, and Charles set Erik's down beside it.

"She was," said Charles. He shrugged with a smile, taking a small, selfish moment to look over Erik's face. He could feel a blush rising in his own, driven by a heart that knew a part of itself when it was stood in front of him. Charles had been drifting, ethereal, all these months, but now he was solid, of flesh, of feeling as well as thought.

Charles opened his mouth to speak, to say that he'd missed him, he'd missed them both, but other words rushed in again. He told them about the installation that he'd had transferred to the house, the radio equipment that Erik had modified for them in London. "I've been using it to contact people like us," he said, leading them to the nearest sitting room and again attempting to curb his childlike exuberance. "There are so many, Erik--though perhaps you already know. I thought about setting it up in the old lab, but the basement needed less cleanup."

Erik sat down across from him while the Professor came to rest close by. "I actually wanted to ask you about that lab," he said.

Charles sat up. "You'd like to use it? It was never redone--you can oversee the restoration, make it exactly as you need. Of course."

Erik smiled at him, and Charles tried to contain himself. The thought of peopling the quiet, empty house with their company, their conversation, their ambitions, thrilled him almost beyond capacity. He felt as though he were starting again, a dormancy breaking in a fresh new season. He had so many questions, some he knew he might not get an answer to, but even asking was an exercise he was grateful to make.

"Oh," he said, rising, "unless you'll both be satisfied with toast and boiled eggs for every meal, let me make a few calls."

Erik rose as well, excusing himself to put their things away, and Charles called after him to take any rooms they wanted, though the single large bedroom on the ground floor was less of a choice. He smiled apologetically to the Professor, who replied genially that he'd feel right at home.

In the quiet, as Charles shuffled through a drawer of contacts, he found he could not wait for one answer in particular. He ceased his rummaging and asked, his voice hushed, whose idea it had been to come. Had it been the Professor's, nudging fate into alignment?

Or had it, as he hoped, been Erik's?

"It was yours," said the Professor. He smiled gently.

Charles blinked at him. At length he let his gaze fall to the papers in front of him again and finally spied what he needed.

As Charles waited for his call to go through, the Professor tipped his head and straightened the cuff of his sweater.

"About that installation downstairs," he said, lightly. "Did you give it a name?"

"No," said Charles, frowning. "Why?"

"No reason."

*****

Two days into their stay, one of which consumed by Erik's visit with his mother, Charles was reading in bed when a knock at his door unnecessarily announced his friend's presence.

"Come in," he called, almost banishing Asimov's _The End of Eternity_ from his lap, but keeping it in the end.

Erik pushed open the door and stepped inside. His hair was rumpled and he wore a dark set of pajamas, not fully buttoned up top. Less devastatingly, he carried his pillow.

Charles smiled at him, scooting to the side of the large bed. "Jet lag?"

"The worst," agreed Erik, quietly sending the door shut behind him and taking the space Charles had left for him, sitting up against the headboard. He nodded over Charles to the nightstand. "What have you got?"

Charles reached over to the pile of reading material looking for something light. He drew out the current issue of _Popular Mechanics_ , and Erik nodded approvingly, taking it from him with keen interest.

Two minutes later, Erik was nodding off, his head inching towards Charles' shoulder as Charles kept his eyes on the same two paragraphs of his book. Erik's cologne had worn off, and every time Charles breathed he was reacquainted with the more comforting scent of his hair, his skin, intimate markers inescapably paired in his memory with the smell of damp earth and lake water and the pages of books older than the one he was holding, forgotten, in his lap.

Before Erik could slump full into him, Charles turned, gently, to suggest they lie down to sleep, but Erik started awake again. At first his eyes returned to the pages of the magazine, but they soon lifted to meet Charles'.

"Erik," he began, softly. He hoped what he was about to ask would not land poorly, and he passed his tongue over his dry lips as though to soften the very words that would leave them. "Are you--with--him?"

To his relief, Erik's expression remained open, though it wrinkled around the corners of his eyes with the smile of the tolerably uncomfortable.

"It's complicated," he said, and he seemed relieved when Charles, too, smiled, an empathetic mimicry.

"Of course."

"But he fully expects us--," Erik added, surprising him, "you and I, I mean--"

Charles felt his face coloring and narrowly resisted pulling the covers over his head.

"Mortifying," he remarked, weakly, but in truth it was the happiest sort of acute embarrassment possible.

"I just thought you should know," said Erik, suppressing a smile so strong that it stilted the words. Then he leaned over and touched his lips to Charles', a chaste gesture that was nevertheless full of warmth. And trust.

When he drew back, he held Charles' gaze for a moment before he closed his magazine. "Shall we say Goodnight?"

"'A thousand times,'" recited Charles, smiling faintly, bewildered but satisfied. He turned to set his book on the nightstand lest it fall off the bed.

"Do you want me to tell you how it ends?"

Charles turned back, frowning. Had the Professor told him something? "How what ends?"

"The book."

"No!" Charles was relieved, yet briefly agitated. "Why would I want that?" Charles reached to turn off the light, but the chain was pulled before he could reach it. In the dark, he settled down onto his pillows and pulled the covers to himself before Erik could.

Erik was laughing. "Never tell a telepath you know the ending to a story."

For Charles knew as soon as he let his guard down he'd be spoiled. "You're a scoundrel," he muttered, closing his eyes and nevertheless rolling to face his tormenter.

"I know," said Erik, and Charles could hear him smiling.

**Works inspired by this one:**

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